Tech’s fight for the upper hand on open data
What happens if big companies control who has access to the marketplace of ideas?
By Rana Foroohar
One thing that’s becoming very clear to me as I report on the digital economy is that a rethink of the legal framework in which business has been conducted for many decades is going to be required. Many of the key laws that govern digital commerce (which, increasingly, is most commerce) were crafted in the 1980s or 1990s, when the internet was an entirely different place.
Consider, for example, the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This 1986 law made it a federal crime to engage in “unauthorised access” to a computer connected to the internet. It was designed to prevent hackers from breaking into government or corporate systems. The mythology is that the law was inspired by War Games, the 1983 movie starring Matthew Broderick.
While few hackers seem to have been deterred by it, the law is being used in turf battles between companies looking to monetise the most valuable commodity on the planet — your personal data. Case in point: LinkedIn vs HiQ, which may well become a groundbreaker in Silicon Valley. LinkedIn is the dominant professional networking platform, a Facebook for corporate types. HiQ is a “data-scraping”…
